Modeling Claim Dependency Structure for Patent Litigation Prediction with Graph Attention Networks

2026-08-22

AI Summary

论文提出ClaimGAT模型，利用图注意力网络处理专利权利要求依赖结构，以提高专利诉讼预测准确性，解决了现有方法忽略权利要求间依赖关系的问题。

Abstract

Patent litigation imposes substantial costs on firms and distorts R&D incentives, making early risk identification a practically important task. While prior work has applied BERT-based models to patent claim text, two fundamental limitations remain: flat sequence encoding loses the dependency structure between independent and dependent claims that legally determines patent scope, and feeding the entire claim set to a single encoder discards legally critical text. A six-model ablation on 1.34 million USPTO utility patents confirms that per-claim encoding, graph connectivity, attention, and Attentional Aggregation each provide independent, additive predictive value. We propose ClaimGAT, a Graph Attention Network that encodes each claim independently, constructs a directed claim dependency graph, processes it with GATConv layers, and aggregates independent claims via Attentional Aggregation to yield both a litigation risk score and claim-level gate weights that enable post-hoc structural analysis. ClaimGAT achieves an AUC-ROC of 0.818 and a lift of 4.89x at the top 10%, using only information observable at the time of patent grant. It reveals a tendency in high-risk patents for structural selection and content sensitivity to diverge, a pattern consistent with defensive claim drafting.

Problem

• Patent Litigation
• Claim Dependency Structure
• Risk Identification

Innovation

• Graph Attention Network
• Claim Dependency
• Attentional Aggregation
• Patent Litigation Prediction